LocalLLaMA
Welcome to LocalLLaMA! Here we discuss running and developing machine learning models at home. Lets explore cutting edge open source neural network technology together.
Get support from the community! Ask questions, share prompts, discuss benchmarks, get hyped at the latest and greatest model releases! Enjoy talking about our awesome hobby.
As ambassadors of the self-hosting machine learning community, we strive to support each other and share our enthusiasm in a positive constructive way.
Rules:
Rule 1 - No harassment or personal character attacks of community members. I.E no namecalling, no generalizing entire groups of people that make up our community, no baseless personal insults.
Rule 2 - No comparing artificial intelligence/machine learning models to cryptocurrency. I.E no comparing the usefulness of models to that of NFTs, no comparing the resource usage required to train a model is anything close to maintaining a blockchain/ mining for crypto, no implying its just a fad/bubble that will leave people with nothing of value when it burst.
Rule 3 - No comparing artificial intelligence/machine learning to simple text prediction algorithms. I.E statements such as "llms are basically just simple text predictions like what your phone keyboard autocorrect uses, and they're still using the same algorithms since <over 10 years ago>.
Rule 4 - No implying that models are devoid of purpose or potential for enriching peoples lives.
view the rest of the comments

It's not entirely unexpected, all the AI companies have been heavily subsidising inference to get customers.
I don't use Codex but I've been experimenting with ECA and I can track my token API costs across Gemini and Anthropic. I'm mostly using Gemini and a heavy days usage would be £1.50 in API costs and I'm certainly not doing that every day. I have to wonder if these Codex users are conscious of how many tokens they are burning underneath or just YOLOing everything until the computer says no?
ECA allows you to mix and match models to sub-agents and I could certainly see me offloading some tasks like code exploration to a locally hosted models and saving the expensive reasoning tokens for planning.
PS: Just to let you know - ECA is fucking amazing! Thank you VERY much for that. I'm currently using Sonnet 4.6 via OpenRouter API to boss around my local Qwen3-4... so far so good :)
Right now, I can see -
Sonnet 4.6 API is not too bad at all at moment
GLM 5.1 is STUPID cheap for what it is (promo?)
And Gemma 4 31B is just taking the piss
(or FREE via Google...but you know...ZDR)
Absolutely true. If I had to pull a number out of thin air, I'd say they were still probably under-charging what it actually costs them to run these things by an order of magnitude or two. So right now, Codex pro costs $150...but in a year or two? $300-400 or even $500? I can see them slowly ratcheting it up. It's the same old story we've seen played out before (eg: Uber, Spotify, Netflix etc).
Doesn't mean it's one we should particularly want to see repeat tho.
Like you, I like the notion of mixing and matching local agents for grunt work and off-loading the thinking to API or SOTA. I hadn't heard of ECA - that looks like it's right up my alley. Thanks for that